Keith McIvor started buying records as a kid in Balerno, spending an inheritance from his grandfather on them. By The Quietus's count, the collection that grew from there reached 20,000 records. In November the first part of it goes back into the racks.
World of Echo has bought the collection of McIvor, who DJed as JD Twitch in Optimo (Espacio). He died in September 2025 of glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumour. Part one is around 7,000 to 8,000 records, on sale in person only at the shop on Cheshire Street, off Brick Lane, from 10:00 on Saturday 14 November.
A crate, not a catalogue
An archive keeps records so they can be looked after. An auction prices them one lot at a time. A working collection was bought to be played, and its owner's family has chosen to treat it that way.
Marissa Costello, McIvor's widow, is quoted by Resident Advisor: "Keith believed records are ultimately there to be played, discovered and loved." And: "We wanted his records to find their way into other people's collections."
Optimo's reputation rests on open-ended, genre-agnostic selecting. A crate like that only stays useful while the records keep moving: off a shop rack, into a bag, onto a deck, out to a room.
How the sale runs
The Quietus reports that the records are cleaned and graded before sale. Resident Advisor reports that each one carries a "World of JD Twitch" sticker.
The shop is given over to the collection until 19 November. After that, the remaining records move into World of Echo's second-hand section. A second instalment is planned for 2027.
There are memorial fanzines too, and they are not for sale. They are available for donations to the Keith McIvor Glioblastoma Research Fund.
Dispersal or archive
Twenty thousand records kept together show how one selector listened across a lifetime. Spread across thousands of other people's shelves, they stop being readable as a single document. Whether that counts as a loss depends on what you think a DJ's records are for.
The family has given their answer. The sticker keeps a little of the archive anyway: each record leaves Cheshire Street marked with where it has been.
